The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain | Hacker News Reader

The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain

fromtheprism.com

36 pointsvoxx-ai72 comments

The UK is busy destroying the little agriculture it has with free-trade agreements like the one with Australia that has far fewer animal-welfare safeguards, thus tying British cattle growers' hands behind their backs, when Australia already has significant comparative advantages. You can imagine what will happen to those supplies if there is any major disruption.

The thing is, global warming is making UK agriculture more productive, but government policies are hostile to agriculture, obsessed as they are with finance and what Dan Wang dismissively calls the "sounding smart industries" like media, which are going to be hit by GenAI like a freight train. The country also needs to get a grip on its water supplies, something that takes long-term investment over decades. The current government is loth to take action against water utilities that were privatized by Thatcher and continuing to be looted by their hedge-fund investors.

Similarly the EU's Common Agricultural Policy was originally a subsidies program for French and Italian farmers. It is long past time for it to be reoriented towards food security. The massive food surpluses like the mountains of EEC butter of my childhood are a distant memory now.

My dad was a UK farmer not so long ago and was paid to set aside land by the EU as production was too high. If they really want more food they could ask farmers to produce it.

Perhaps it's time Britain improved its food supply which hasn't been self-sufficient since, probably, the Napoleonic Wars.

That being said if the population continues to grow at the pace it is, there won't be enough water, either.

Are more northern countries able to take over some of the production? I'd guess maybe as water declines in southern countries, the temperature rises so more northern latitudes might grow the same crops.

Of course it's going to take time for different agriculture regions to get set up.

Northern countries don’t have the soil. Even if you take it for granted that the water, heat and sunlight will be there, it takes millennia to create good farmland. Even with heavy investment it would take decades.

Vertical farms would work, but those work almost anywhere.

What???

Do you say that Denmark, Sweden, north Germany, Poland, and the Baltics can't grow crops due to lack of good soil?

Most of Scandinavia is recently emerged and you can use your hands and a wooden stick to remove the vegetable soil and uncover the silt that was at the bottom of the ocean a few hundred years ago. And before that, that silt was dirt mixed in the ice. So, there is not a lot of organic anything there.

However, I think that soil is good enough. With the huge caveat that I'm not an expert by any means, I do believe that fertilizers and greenhouses would work. Also, you can make soil with some organic refuse and rudimentary industry. It's more of a question of all the other factors (labor) can be put in place.

..."a few hundred years ago"?

It was covered in ice a few tens of thousands of years ago. As far as I'm aware, the last time it was the bottom of the sea was some significant number of millions of years ago.

Scandinavia has been free of ice for roughly as long as, say, Canada and the northern US.

I don't know much about its soil quality, but if your claim is that it's got only a couple of inches of good soil because it "recently emerged", I'm going to be very skeptical of your other claims.

Hm? You could do a search, but here is an article: https://www.discoversormland.com/blog/?postglacial-rebound . Another fun exercise is to simply look at Google maps. If you squint just right, you’ll see extremely flat valleys (ocean bottom) punctuated by old islands.

I live 300 meters from the present coastline and have toured the area a bit. There are telltale signs everywhere, including towers and docks that were built at the waterline sometime AC and that now stand a fair bit inland.

I'm aware of postglacial rebound. It doesn't account for what you described, which is that "most of Scandinavia is recently emerged".

I did, in fact, do some quick searching myself before writing my previous reply, just to make sure I wasn't missing something stupidly obvious, and the Wikipedia article on Scandinavian prehistory[0] confirmed that people have been living there for at least several thousand years. They've even been farming there since roughly 4000 BC.

So no: "most of Scandinavia" wasn't under the ocean "a few hundred years ago".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_prehistory

> Vertical farms would work

They won't, because the energy demands are too great. Photosynthesis, after all, is 1-2% efficient

Also, let me know when cereals, pulses and nuts are being grown in vertical farms. There's a reason all existing vertical farms are just growing low-calorie low-protein leafy plants.

One of the challenges is that the decline in water in southern regions is not solely climate driven - even if we froze the climate as it is right now, ground water sources are being overdrawn (from the article for example, Cyprus is overdrawing ground water by 40%, but rainfall is only down 17% since 1900), and so we would expect regions to face agricultural collapse faster than climatic zones shift north.

So far, climatic zone shifts are on the order of 10-100km per decade.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-wor...

They are having the opposite problem. For instance, this year, crop failure is rife in the Baltics, as the warmer atmosphere means it has Not. Stopped. Raining. - and so fields are either too waterlogged for machinery, or crops have drowned in the ground.

This is a good, thoughtful analysis. I think many people outside the Mediterranean region are simply unaware of water issues there. As for the UK, I can't understand why they have allowed sustained high immigration rates for decades despite food insecurity and a housing shortage.

> why they have allowed sustained high immigration rates for decades

recently its because we need skilled and cheap labour to fill the holes in our health and buisness system.

Housing shortages is not a direct immigration issue[1], its a policy issue. People of a certain type do not want high rise buildings near them. people of another different type are really happy because they can now build less and sell for more. Yet another class of people go apoplectic when its suggested that social housing should be built (my taxes! why do they get something for nothing.)

In short, we are our own worst enemies.

[1] net migration at 1 million was utterly insane, and I'm still not sure how a government that lead brexit with "we'll control our borders" managed to be so divorced from what it was doing. Thats rhetorical by the way its short-termism and utter utter incompetence.

Isn't it a pyramid scheme where we import younger people to pay for older people's pensions and benefits... unlikely to end well, like all pyramid schemes.

Not necessarily in this case. You have those who pay in, but die before they fully collect. Then the collectors do die off, they aren’t expected to get returns in perpetuity or crazy large returns. Then you have a constant supply of new payees into the system.

Only a devastating collapse of the population would cause it to go tits up

And in your comment lies a possible solution. Support people into their mid-70s, and then the only medical care they get is palliative, so they don't suffer from whatever takes them out. Half of their estate is allocated to the social welfare fund.

Another solution is to increase the sources of funding. For example, in the United States, your Social Security contributions are capped once your income exceeds approximately $160,000. Eliminate that cap, and include income from other sources (i.e., taxes on estates, capital gains, and buy-borrow-die) in the Social Security tax calculation.

Any "solution" will have to work within the realm of political possibility. Elderly people also get to vote and I doubt they will support cutting off their own access to healthcare, or drastic increases in estate taxes.

No doubt we can probably do things better, my main thrust was to show how if you can force participation, you can kind of get away with it.

I'd say no. A pyramid has a wide base. The problem is the population shape is more of one of a christmas tree. The top is narrow, and it widens at the middle, then you have a trunk that is more narrow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_K...

The UK doesn't even have that terrible of shape compared to many western countries, but a lot of that is because of immigration.

Countries like Japan, S. Korea, and Italy are going to have far worse problems.

Population has naturally been a pyramid, historically [0], and works well that way. The current problem is that it isn’t a pyramid anymore [1]. Not having an inverse pyramid (or kite) would already be helpful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid#Demographic...

It's not a pyramid (far more balance between those entering and leaving to call it a "pyramid").

Unless you are Norway or the UAE and sitting on a massive sovereign wealth fund how else can a national welfare system possible function?

The replies to this made me think harder about pyramid schemes vs population pyramids.

I concluded it is in fact OK to bring in young working people from elsewhere to fund the retirement and social services of those already here and ageing. I was thinking there would be a problem as those immigrants in turn aged and switched from net contributors to net claimants, but I hadn't taken into account that they like all of us die off as they age: indeed, what makes the pyramid a pyramid.

Britain has a very generous welfare system it cannot afford and appears to be unable to even reverse its expansion. According to the Center for Migration Control, there are 1.15 million foreign born individuals claiming some form of in-work benefit.

Irrespective of one's views on the migrant question, this is unsustainable. For instance, the National Health System (NHS) has recently been sending patients to Poland and Lithuania to try to relieve pressure on the waiting lists.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...

In-work benefits should have been presented as a short term measure to cushion the impact of the introduction of the minimum wage. The minimum wage should then have been steadily increased to eleminate the benefit.

Alternatively, use the computer system that manages the in-work benefits to find out which companies are exploiting the current system and tax them to fund their own workforce.

> According to the Center for Migration Control, there are 1.15 million foreign born individuals claiming some form of in-work benefit.

Isn't the relevant statistic more just how much tax income foreign born individuals give the government vs how much they take out?

I don't have a source on hand, but I thought immigration was a net positive in terms of tax revenue minus social assistance, at least in the US.

>Irrespective of one's views on the migrant question, this is unsustainable.

That's neither true nor irrespective of your views on "the migrant question", which are evidently informed by an explicitly anti-immigration interest group.

A million immigrant workers claiming "some form of in-work benefit" is not significant. See e.g. £23B unclaimed benefits last year.

Your fact about NHS waiting times doesn't support any claim you've made.

It's like you're trolling, but perhaps the best interpretation is you're a GBNews victim?

> Britain has a very generous welfare system

Its more generous than the USA. but its not generous. You try living on benefits

> 1.15 million foreign born individuals claiming some form of in-work benefit.

Indeed, but working age foreigners are way cheaper than boomer pensioners. The problem is, a large proportion of those foreigner are working to wipe the arses of said pensioners.

Moreover those benefits are a a state subsidy for cheap workers.

> Irrespective of one's views on the migrant question, this is unsustainable. For instance, the National Health System (NHS) has recently been sending patients to Poland and Lithuania to try to relieve pressure on the waiting lists.

Which is ironically unrelated to foreigners.

firsly, if your stuck on a waiting list not being able to work, you're not claiming in work benefits.

second the NHS has been chronically mismanaged for about 14 years, and needs staffing reforms to stop it bleeding staff (and driving up immigration)

thirdly sending people abroad to get treated is cheaper, and should return them to the workforce quicker, so reducing load on the benefits system

Lastly, immigrants are overwhelmingly young and free of chronic diseases. Its super hard to work an emigrate, find and keep a casual job if you need dialysis every week. Moreover, you don't get access to benefits instantly, and you run the risk of going undocumented which means no bank account, no public services and no legitimate housing. Its not like the states where you can carry on as normal. You're basically reduced to living on the streets or at the hands of organised crime.

What food insecurity?

We joined a successful agricultural union (the EEC, in 1973) and remained a member of its successor for decades and had fantastic access to produce, and some of the cheapest food in the EU (also thanks to a highly competitive grocery sector)

Even since leaving, the food supply issues have been very minor.

We may have food insecurity in the future but I'm confused if you're implying we've had any serious food insecurity the last few decades

If a country depends on foreign imports just to satisfy basic needs then they are food insecure, by definition. Membership in alliances and trading blocs is temporary, and if other countries have the power to cut you off then that's an existential threat. You would think that the UK would have learned something from the food shortages during WWII when a blockade was in effect. The country might have starved if not for military and logistical support from Canada and the USA.

We obviously have a very different definition of food insecurity. I don't agree with your definition. I think you're talking about import dependence.

The World Food Programme define it as "Food security exists when people have access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development, and an active and healthy life". They also link to the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which hasn't even ranked much of Europe, I imagine for quite obvious reasons.

The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) defines it as "the generally accepted definition of food security is "a situation in which all people at all times have access to adequate quantities of safe and nutritious food to lead a healthy and active life".

Importing food can strengthen food security. Complete self-sufficiency can be a weakness too - we have one bad year of weather and oops sorry people starve because we did away with our all produce import systems?

Systemic resilience to me seems more important that the exact origin of the food.

We are a country adept at international trade and I don't see why we should stop over some odd notion that imports are bad.

Many, many other countries import a lot of their food. We are not weird outliers.

Which countries do you think we should model ourselves over, out of curiosity? Who excels at self sufficiency (except the US - we aren't all blessed at having the power, geography and climate of the US. Nor frankly do we think their agricultural system is an example to copy)

Later

Regarding WWII, of course the entire continent learnt a lot of hard lessons - particularly about agricultural policy. I already mentioned the EEC. Desire for peace was a big reason for agricultural co-operation, if I recall my history correctly. The continent with many countries that loved wars would have no problem going to war over food

You're missing the point. Those definitions you cite are only relevant to individuals or groups of people, not entire nation states. No one is claiming that imports are "bad" or proposing to do away with all food imports, but countries should be able to produce enough staple foodstuffs to meet the basic caloric and nutritional needs of their population. Otherwise they continue to exist only on the sufferance of others. Do you really believe that the UK could never, ever be blockaded again? Has history come to an end?

Besides the USA there are a number of countries which are at least mostly food secure including Canada, Russia, India, Brazil, France, Ukraine, Australia, and New Zealand. Some of those do depend on imports of fossil fuels and fertilizers to maintain production.

You're just trolling. I'm done

I was thinking that - I've lived in the UK for 60 years and not noticed much food insecurity. I mean if we were cut off there would be shortage of avocados and bananas and the like but we wouldn't starve. We might have to take some of the set aside land and plant potatoes or something.

The food security situation in the UK was looking pretty dire 83 years ago. Food imports were cut in half, and attempts to increase domestic production had only limited success. It would have gotten a lot worse if Canada and the USA hadn't stepped in to help break the German blockade and deliver food aid. Memories are apparently short.

The Mediterranean sea is full of water and desalination exists so the problem is solvable given enough energy - the sun is known to be quite reliable in this region so that part of the equation is taken care of - and infrastructure. Israel shows this is possible so like in so many ways they can be the good example to follow in the area. No need to speak of a 'collapse', there is enough panic porn as it is already. Solve the problem, don't whinge about it.

> Dr Kaveh Madani, Iran's former deputy environment head now at the UN University, has called sanctions "an environmental weapon." It's a strong claim, but the effect is undeniable: countries facing water stress are being denied the tools to address it.

Yes. Sanctions aren't supposed to be unpleasant. They're supposed to be painful. They're supposed to be a more peaceful substitute for literal violence.

> It's a crisis measured in hard numbers: reservoir levels, rainfall data, aquifer depletion rates.

Of course I went to check the actual numbers from official sources and they tell a different story. Reservoir levels near historical maximum. So much for building an article on "hard numbers" without pointing to sources.

For cypress its half as much water in the reseviours compared to last year: https://www.moa.gov.cy/moa/wdd/Wdd.nsf/page18_en/page18_en?o...

what data are you looking at?

Italy, Spain... eg. https://embalses.net shows maximum historical levels after a sharp bump these past 2 years... pretty sure it's the same story in many EU countries. Droughts are there until they aren't. Normal fluctuations if you check an actual chart going 50-100 years back.

Can you post a historical chart of Cyprus? maybe it tells a different story

Droughts are there until they aren't. Now you see it, now you don't. That's just a perspective of the annual situation, but there's an emerging pattern of recurring drought at shorter and shorter intervals. It's right there in the article: "'We used to have drought cycles every 20 years,' according to Cyprus Water Development Department data. 'Now it's every two or three years.'"

We had an exceptionally wet winter - reservoirs which I have not seen full in a decade are suddenly at capacity - or were, a few weeks ago. There’s now a rapid draw-down however as the weather has shifted to unseasonably hot almost overnight.

The main problem isn’t reservoir levels, however, as most agriculture in Iberia doesn’t use reservoir water, rather, on-site boreholes - and the groundwater is getting seriously depleted.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that folks do here that doesn’t help matters, however - olive groves and other arboriculture, which is a large part of agriculture in Iberia, are kept with bare topsoil, as the belief is that the grass steals the water, and irrigation is done with broadcast rather than drip, and it all evaporates almost as fast as they can spray it. We don’t plough or irrigate ours, and we get a crop - we just cut the grass at the end of spring to reduce the fire hazard. There’s also a tragedy of the commons affair going on, where people pump as much as possible from their boreholes in the spring to keep in open black plastic lined storage ponds, because they feel that if they don’t their neighbour will get the water and there won’t be any for them - so water which would have been safely stored underground is brought to the surface and put in perfect conditions to evaporate.

None of it is sustainable, and it’s going to end in tears.

Usually that is a sign of subsidized water below cost, which disincentivizes the more efficient irrigation methods you highlight, at least that's what happens in California with is baroque system of senior and junior water rights and its "use it or lose it" mentality.

Yup, it’s just an annual fixed fee to have a borehole - which most folks don’t even pay as enforcement is nonexistent.

Maybe that Sabine lady with the Youtube channel that people seem to take seriously because she has a funny German accent?

And you thought you’d refute it by also not providing sources?

Can you? can you provide a historical (25+ years) chart of reservoir levels in Cyprus or any EU country? Otherwise let me assume you just fell for a sensationalist article

You’re the one saying you have sources that disagree with the article not me?

The distracting slow fade css of the text immediately signals a site that doens't dogfood their own site

Solar is so cheap that desalination is cheap enough that the only thing that will get appreciably more expensive is water intensive products like beef.

Desalination is not just about power, you've have to build and maintain the thing. There are consumables as well.

Also, the brine. Though I assume if water becomes scarce enough, we'll just dump the brine back into the environment and nature be damned as per usual

Brine can be piped to deeper depths, or just diluted before dumping, the cost is increased energy demand

Dumping concentrated ocean water back into the ocean just can't be a big problem.

Doesn't brine contain appreciable amounts of lithium—which is highly in demand?

Couldn't it be further dried out to harvest that lithium for sale?

According [0], you need 1451 liter per kg of beef. Sorek B will cost $0.41/m3 [1] so water cost will be 0.59$, cheapest beef I could find in quick google here in Israel is $17.68 per kg so 3.3% increase.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food [1]: https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-dr...

The Saudis don't seem to have a problem getting it done.

How much fruit and vegetable agriculture (topic of the article) are they doing with their desalinated water? Hopefully none as they generate 99+% of their electricity from oil+gas and the climate impact from it would be atrocious.

I don't know. Here are some numbers to plug into your calculator:

"The country's water needs were estimated at 24.8 billion m³ in 2015, with an average fixed annual growth rate of 7 percent. With 84 percent of the total water demand, the agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water in the country."

"In 2015, these plants had a total production capacity of 6.28 million m³ per day, which increased to 7.4 million m³ per day by 2020. By 2024, the combined production from both public and private desalination plants reached approximately 11.5 million m³ per day."

https://saudipedia.com/en/article/2549/government-and-politi...

No, they bought huge quantities of senior water rights in California and are shipping alfalfa grown there back to Saudi, essentially laundering water.

Is it really that cheap already? I thought desalination was more like an “not enough power by an order of magnitude” type problem. Solar that is a little cheaper than fossil fuels wouldn’t solve it, right?

Although, I’d be happy to be wrong there!

Desalination does seem like a useful shiftable load that could incentivize over-building solar, which is always nice.

> Desalination does seem like a useful shiftable load

Yes this is a really nice feature, you can store excess water for essentially free. This probably shifts the economics of desalination to favor technologies that are more energy intensive but lower capex and opex.

Stopped reading at "vertical farms" as a solution. It doesn't matter how energy intensive desalination is when the energy input arrives for free from space. People need to get used to not caring about efficiency.

100% agree. ground cover, combined with increasing dwell time is the cheapest and most efficient way to increase water retention.

Why the article talks about Iran in an article supposedly about "Mediterranean water"? It felt out of place for me

I mean, if they talk about the UK and the Mediterranean, why not Iran too? Hell, let's toss in some other countries not on the Mediterranean while we're at it. Japan maybe?

In terms of climate zones, it’s arguably connected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate

Iran's climate is not really connected to the Mediterranean sea - they are 2000km from Lebanon, just because they have a silver of land that happened to fall under mediaterrian classifcation doesn't mean they are mediaterrean

My point was that while it isn’t part of the Mediterranean as a geographic region, the Mediterranean as a climate zone does extend into Iran. And the article is about that climatical and agricultural zone.

I understood your point I just don't find it convincing. For example modern olive (staple of mediaterrian for thousand of years) don't come close to Iran (according to the map on Wikipedia). If you look at map of predicted future water stress you will see it includes far more than mediaterrian climate (or mediaterrian). Thus my main point - it doesn't make sense to call it "Mediterranean Water Collapse"

A lot of these 'water crisis' articles seem to try to make it out to be more of a crisis than it is, in that the amount of water remains similar and people squabble over what to use it for. Like in Cyprus they say the amount of water is down 17% since 1900 which is not that much and the main reason they are short is "all these tourists, all these golf courses". Life is full of trade offs - you have to decide whether to use it for vineyards or golf courses but I'm not sure that's the crisis the article makes out.

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